Forescout Technology Encourages Security Management Info Sharing

ForeScout Technologies Tuesday introduced technology that allows other security vendors as well as third parties such as systems integrators to share monitoring and security-related information directly with ForeScout's CounterAct network-access control product.

ForeScout Technologies Tuesday introduced technology that allows other security vendors as well as third parties such as systems integrators to share monitoring and security-related information directly with ForeScout's CounterAct network-access control product.

The new ControlFabric interface technology also lets CounterAct, which is an appliance for monitoring and controlling network access while detecting vulnerability information, share information it has related to an enterprise network with other security vendors. A number of them, including McAfee, today indicated support for ControlFabric

Ed Barry, vice president of the McAfee security innovation alliance, says McAfee has had a long relationship with ForeScout, for example by working to share security information with McAfee's ePolicy Orchestrator. The next step is leveraging ControlFabric to share threat-detection and other information between CounterAct and the McAfee Enterprise Security Manager (ESM), a security information and event management (SIEM) product. Other projects in the works involve sharing vulnerability-assessment data. "Some things McAfee sees, some things ForeScout sees," says Barry about why combining information across vendor boundaries makes sense. "The idea is to create nimble security."

ForeScout says ControlFabric is being supported by vendors that include mobile-device management vendors in the form of plug-in modules for AirWatch, Citrix, Fiberlink. MobileIron and SAF Afaria.

In addition to McAfee's ESM, other SIEM products supporting ControlFabric include HP ArcSight, IBM QRadar, RSA Envision, Splunk Enterprise and Tibco LogLogic. In terms of Advanced Threat Detection, support for FireEye is said to be available and a module is also planed for McAfee's upcoming Advanced Threat Defense sandboxing product.